Chapter 16

Kaleb ordered Alja to stay after the other men had left. He still had a lot of questions. He signaled her to sit down at the desk across from him. The cardboard box and its disgusting contents were already waiting for examination in one of his labs.

"It surprises me that you're so keen to stay here after I threatened you with death barely an hour ago. Are you really that afraid of Ming?"

Oh come on! Alja suppressed the urge to roll her eyes at him. Tell a Psy you feel and he assumes you have no functioning reason. Only that for her it seemed to be true. Part of her mind still lingered on the memory of his body pressed against hers when he'd pinned her to the window. Her heart kicked up a little at the thought of that hard muscle and male heat that had almost sent her usually numb senses to overload. Yeah, while he had a knife at your throat. If that's what gets you off… Her own reason started mocking her again. But after her reassuring conversation with the NetMind it was a little easier to pull herself together.

"I'm going to be your secret weapon. Most Psy would give their right arm for such a position." Perfectly true. Most Psy would.

"You didn't strike me as the power-hungry type." But Alja was right. Why shouldn't she have an agenda of her own? He pulled the willow-glass blade out of the inside pocked of his jacket and held it out to her, the flat handle pointing towards her.

"I'm not the anxious type either." The speed with which she took the blade told a different story.

"I apologize for threatening you. That was way over the top." He had no idea where those words came from. He didn't apologize to people. All of his actions were carried out exactly as planned and fully justified.

"Don't bother. Your behavior was only logical."

She discarded the apology with Psy indifference. Suddenly that bugged him. He wanted her to be provocative and disrespectful again. It fit her much better. But she went on before he could say more.

"I should apologize for the kick. That was inappropriate for a sparring-match. But you look very good.–" Oh no! You didn't just say that, Alja. The words were out before their meaning registered in the reasonable part of her mind. She quickly tried to correct the lapse. "Your face does. – You haven't got any bruises." The shortest moment of awkward silence. Changing the subject seemed a good idea now. "There's only one thing I'd like to know: How much information about me does the other staff get?"

Kaleb wondered why she suddenly seemed uneasy. It wasn't as if she'd kicked him that hard. At least there was one thing she still seemed concerned about. Her disguise. So that hadn't changed with him knowing about her unusual skills. It could also mean that there was more than he already knew.

"A 'secret weapon' should stay secret. As for your Arrow status, I suppose some of them already suspect. But I see no need to confirm any suspicions at the moment. I guess that meets with your approval."

"It does. Do you have any assignments ready for me?" Deal or not she hoped he wouldn't demand her projection too often. She was emotionally imbalanced enough already. And someone like him wasn't likely to require her skills for healing.

"No, not yet. But I think you have a story to tell. We agreed on full disclosure of your origins." He wanted to know everything about this woman who seemed specifically designed to threaten him, to oppose him. He couldn't affect her with his psychic powers unless she allowed it, while he had no way of blocking or at least detecting hers. He had never met someone who could match him in that way. It was intriguing. It was more than that, but he wasn't ready to admit it.

Alja started where she knew Aden had stopped; glad she didn't have to tell the part about her parents herself. It hurt her although she'd never known them – the first two on a long list of people who had died because of her. And as of today there was one more name on it.

Marino Ghetty.

"Marino Ghetty was the Arrow in charge of training the youngest children at the facility where they took me. He was very interested in my potential from the start. My first memories are of him and I can hardly recall having had contact to any other trainers before I was four years old. Then Ming LeBon first took interest in me. By that time it was obvious, that I didn't take on the conditioning too well and there were suspicions about my abilities being in a non-martial sector. When Ming came for me, he immediately tried to get through my shields and when he found he couldn't, he tried to make me lower them. But at the time I didn't know how, so I couldn't do it no matter how hard he tried." Kaleb didn't need to ask about the nature of Ming's trying. If the cardinal telepath found his psychic abilities blocked, he would have tried physically – with a lot of pain. "I tried to endure it, stay hard and cold as I was taught. But he didn't stop and at one point I just got too scared and too desperate. I remember I wanted him to understand how I felt to make him stop. So I projected all my fear and pain at him with full force. He didn't even consider that I might be useful in any way. He just ran away as fast as he could and ordered my immediate execution." Alja didn't bother to hide the contempt in her tone, when she said it.

"But Marino Ghetty defied the order." Kaleb leaned back in his chair his eyes not moving from her face. She knew this probably was a dominance game and she should look away under the pressure of that intense gaze and show some respect at last. But this time it wasn't even provocation. She just couldn't bring herself to tear her gaze away from the beautifully calm star fields in his eyes – not when she perceived something like genuine interest in them for the first time.

"It was more accidental at first. Right after the incident was the first time I dropped out of the Net – probably due to the flameout after using so much power. So Ming believed Marino had acted on his orders. But he hadn't. Instead he took the opportunity to hide me in the Net when I relinked. I don't know what he saw in me or why he let me live. He was a scientist. I guess he saw the potential in me rather than the threat." And that potential was far more and far different from what Kaleb had learned today. But she was never going to disclose that truth to anyone. "He signed me into a very remote training facility and changed basically everything about my identity. I even got genetic treatment to bring out the more recessive genes as I grew up. So my originally black hair brightened to red-brown and my facial features evened out to look less like my mothers. By the time I crossed Ming's path again six years later I looked nothing like the girl he had known and was fully capable of retracting my shields and showing him the well-trained but ordinary mind of a future elite soldier. At the time I entered active service the Squad had already begun to estrange from Ming. Our loyalty towards the ones we'd been trained with, fought with, was stronger than our loyalty to a leader who betrayed us in pursuit of power in the Council ranks."

"That's why Aden and Vasic didn't blow your cover."

"Yes, I knew Aden from the compensatory training – the martial training for those whose primary ability doesn't lie in combat. He knew from the start that I was different."

At that moment a small light on Kaleb's computronic desk flashed. He tapped on it and it went out immediately but obviously it was a sign of something important that needed his attention.

"Too bad, we won't have more time to talk today. You can get back to your regular schedule."

She stood up in one fluent movement. "Sir." The single word was frosted and accompanied by one of those minimal nods. Her cool practicality irritated him again. And he realized it wasn't that he was expecting her to act emotional, because he knew she was capable of feeling, but because he wanted her to. He wanted her to be affected by him as he was by her.

He traced her body with his eyes until the door of his office closed. Then he followed her mind with his telepathy until she was in her quarters. There was no real pain yet but he could feel the pressure of the dissonance building up in the back of his head again. And the reaction was only so low, because he actively suppressed the impulses Alja had incited in him. That had never been necessary to this day. The pain controls were only warning lights in case anything should ever escape from the part of his mind he'd started locking away when he was still a child. But he had sealed that part shut almost fifteen years ago. He had never wanted to feel, after what he saw that day.

Today he'd found out that against all his precautions there were still other parts of him that seemed to be capable of emotional reactions. And those were very different from the hate and fear that he'd known when he was a child. When he thought about Alja, he glimpsed something that would probably feel – pleasant. He knew what it was that she triggered in him: attraction. And he was no longer so sure whether he wanted to shut that off too. How long would his self-imposed Silence hold against feelings he wanted to feel?

No, this condition couldn't go on.

He could never be allowed to feel. When he felt innocents suffered. That was a fact that had been burned into his self so deep he didn't even question if there ever might be another way. Although it took significant effort he pulled his hold on Silence strangling-tight once again.

Then he finally reacted to the call from Silver's office.

"Sir, I've been trying to get to you for almost twenty minutes. Your office was under complete technical and psychic lockdown. May I ask what the matter was?" Silver was not used to be shut out. She was his right hand after all.

"I cleared out a security matter with our new shield specialist. Nothing you need to be concerned about." Technically that was not even a lie. "It was necessary that you weren't informed about it before. Now what did you want me for?" He did not usually explain his actions to his subordinates, but Silver and the connection to the Mercant family group had proven a big asset in the surveillance of Pure Psy. He couldn't afford to alienate her by letting himself get distracted by Alja for too long, interesting as she might be.

"My Pure Psy contacts have gotten the mental signature you asked for. As for the voice, I hope the memory record is enough. Shall I telepath it now?"

"Do it. – That was excellent work Silver. Thank you." He'd check up on it to be sure of the quality. But if Silver's contacts were as useful as he had estimated, he already had a perfect use for Alja's skills.